Thursday, June 4, 2015

Political parties and organizational intelligence 2

Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial ("misplaced confidence", "kidded themselves"), believing that "organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership". Following the election, "a danger now is oversteering the other way".

Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in 'blue collar conservatism'. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts "is the self-knowledge to
identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute
appointments". Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne's plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative's relationship with the working classes.

What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.

Steve Richards goes further ...

"During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a
party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be
an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if
they do not last that long. ... In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier
than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery."

... and insists that "the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate".

One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be
to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just
debate, but debate linked with action.

Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour's inner circle.

"Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of
views in the room. ... [Miliband] enjoyed that.
He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very
interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described
typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him
is as weak, but internally he had great control."

But that's not enough.

"The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly
intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its
parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in
which opposing voices cancelled one another out."

Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is
just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated 'spads', and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as "leader". Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.

Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.

Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland
argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future,
and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour
government's role in the 2008 economic crisis.

"The management gurus and
political consultants may tell
us always to
face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the
future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the
past lingers."